Self-Sacrifice (7 page)

Equally amazingly, although unsurprisingly, much of the so-called independent evidence on which the UK government based their decision to list the PMOI as a terrorist organisation turned out to have come from two individuals who lived in the UK and were well-known as paid agents of the Mullahs in Tehran! Iranian citizen Massoud Khodabandeh had been recruited by the MOIS, the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security, in the late 1990s, and his British
wife, Anne Singleton, had been recruited by the MOIS in 2002.
¹
Both had been trained by Iran and were well-known for press articles and propaganda that always sought to trash the PMOI and its leadership and supporters. For the UK government to base their terrorism charges on evidence supplied by two MOIS agents was preposterous. The whole thing was farcical and exposed the appeasement charade in which Blair and Straw had been engaged. No wonder the POAC delivered such a withering judgement.

The POAC’s verdict stated: ‘This appeal against the refusal of the Secretary of State to de-proscribe the PMOI is allowed’ and ‘we order that the Secretary of State should lay before parliament the draft of an Order under section 3(3)(b) of the 2000 Act removing the PMOI from the list of proscribed organisations in Schedule 2’. The judgement also noted: ‘Having carefully considered all the material before us, we have concluded that the decision at the first stage is properly characterised as perverse. We recognise that a finding of perversity is uncommon. We believe, however, that this Commission is in the (perhaps unusual) position of having before it all of the material that is relevant to this decision. In our view, that is a requirement of the 2000 Act and of the procedures adopted before this commission. The material available to us is, therefore, wider, more extensive and more detailed than the evidence that is commonly before a judge in the Administrative court.’

As the legal battles raged, the European Council of Ministers, in an act of open defiance of the courts, renewed the EU proscription of the PMOI on 15 July 2008. On 4 December that year, the Court of First Instance annulled the renewed proscription of 15 July and once again ordered that the PMOI be delisted and their assets unfrozen. Despite this ruling, there were further attempts by the European Council, stoked up by pressure from Tehran, to defy the courts. But by mid-December, the Court of First Instance rejected, as ‘manifestly inadmissible’, all attempts by EU governments to delay implementation of their 4 December judgement. As a result, after a war of attrition that had raged for years, the PMOI were finally delisted in the EU on 26 January 2009. Justice had at last prevailed.

The willingness of the UK, French and other EU governments to defy the courts was breathtaking. Although British judges in the POAC had gone into the substance and full details of the case and had ruled that the decision of the UK Home Secretary to maintain the PMOI on the UK list of proscribed organisations was ‘perverse’, the UK Government still trotted out a junior minister to make a fatuous announcement that the government ‘did not accept’ the court’s verdict and had decided to appeal. They tried every legal and political trick to defy the courts.

The entire affair was marked by a long and disgraceful series of blunders by the Blair government at Westminster over its handling of the PMOI and relations with Iran in general. It was common knowledge that, as Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw had visited Tehran more often than any other capital in the world except Brussels and Washington. But the deals he struck with the fascist Mullahs left an indelible stain on Britain’s character. Straw had admitted in a BBC Radio interview that he placed the PMOI on the UK terror list at the direct request of the Mullahs, who greatly feared the ability of this popular opposition movement to topple their odious regime. The Mullahs further pressed Straw to place the PMOI on the EU’s terror list, threatening commercial penalties for UK interests in Iran if he refused to comply. Displaying characteristic weakness, Jack Straw had readily concurred, despite the fact that he had once been an open supporter of the PMOI as an Opposition Labour MP.

No one would have guessed that EU bureaucrats, entrusted to enact and uphold the rule of law, would scramble to find ways to defy the courts, making a mockery of the rule of law upon which the institutions of the EU and European member states are founded. Violating the rule of law and placing the European Council of Ministers’ opinion above that of the EU’s highest courts in yet another pathetic attempt to appease Iran was both scandalous and shameful.

In a speech in the European Parliament in Strasbourg I said:

Terrorism is the greatest threat of our time. Terrorists not only endanger our lives, they also challenge our freedoms and our democratic system of government. The difference between democracy and tyranny is the system of checks and balances. What made it frustratingly difficult for me was the fact that some bureaucrats in the EU were contemplating compromising this sacred principle for the sake of political expediency. What made it even more perplexing was that these political leaders had been given the mandate of safeguarding our democratic system. For them to seek to undermine the system under the guise of combating terrorism was particularly perverse.

Since the late 1990s, the issue of the PMOI was part and parcel of the EU’s negotiations with the Iranian regime in a futile attempt to moderate Tehran’s behaviour. For instance, on 21 October 2004, the Agence France-Presse agency reported:

The official document made it abundantly clear that the issue was finding ways to placate the Mullahs and had nothing to do with the merit and conduct of the Iranian resistance movement.

The continued determination of the PMOI, over many years, to clear its name and remove the unfair and unlawful terrorist designation with which it had been labelled, had become an almost classic example of a David and Goliath struggle. Victory in the British courts and subsequently in the EU courts was a first major taste of success for the PMOI and a severe blow to the Mullahs in Tehran. It was also a clear demonstration that the PMOI and its network of international supporters could achieve the impossible.

1.
A Pentagon report of January 2013 identified Massoud Khodabandeh and Anne Singleton as trained MOIS agents.

8

Interviews with Political Prisoners Refugee Camp, Tirana, Albania, May 2014

Najmeh Hadj Heydari

‘My name is Najmeh Hadj Heydari. I am Azam’s sister [see
Chapter 6
]. I was arrested in the city of Saveh in 1982 and taken to Evin in Tehran. While in the torture chamber I told them I was pregnant. They did not believe me and started to torture me with cables, whipping the soles of my bare feet. In the public ward they asked me what I thought about the Mullahs and Khomeini. I said they deserve to die for usurping the freedom of the people of Iran. A half hour later they took me to Ward 311, the punishment ward.

There were six or seven people in each cell, usually awaiting execution. They would open the cell three times a day for food. Then it fell to once a day. I was placed in solitary confinement for 45 days and only allowed out to go to the washroom. We were not allowed to shower and we were given no bedding. I was freezing. 45 days later I was brought back to the larger cell. A girl called Maryam Yazdi Ostovar, who was only 16 years old, had a bloody mark on her left leg, and her feet were shredded and swollen as a result of torture. Surgeons had removed the skin from her leg to mend her feet. She was from the city of Qazvin and told me that her brother had been executed. “They wanted me to divulge information and whipped me relentlessly on the soles of my feet, shredding them to pieces. Eventually they realised that I could tell them nothing, so they operated on my feet to mend them too.”

Later I noticed that Maryam had been taken for interrogation again. Peeking from under her blindfold she recognized one of the people being interrogated. But half an hour later they took her out again and she disappeared for two weeks. When she returned, she could only walk on her knees. She asked for a copy of the
Koran
and lay down next to the wall, put the
Koran
on her chest and told me
what had happened. Her feet were shattered. This continued for a whole week. Since she could not stand they tied her in order to hold her upright so they could continue torturing her. After telling us this she said, “leave me alone”. At 5 am they opened the door of our cell for prayers and she was unable to get up. We went to prayers, but when we returned we realised she was dead. The Guards forced us to stand next to the wall until her body was taken away.

Another woman named Razieh Ayatollahzadeh Shirazi, a student who had joined the PMOI during the Shah’s time, was pregnant and had been tortured. In Ward 311 there used to be a bakery, the heat from which transferred to the floor of the prison. She said the heat would eventually kill her baby. Three weeks later, her baby died. She said the baby’s death was the price we pay for freedom. Her husband had already been executed. In 1985 she was executed too.

I got to know a 45-year-old mother named Rezvan Rafipoor in Ward 240. She was tortured every three weeks in order to extract information from her about her daughter. The severe beatings had left horrible bruises on her body. She was then taken to “the dormitory”, a special ward for political prisoners. After experiencing that ward, she was so distraught that she said it was impossible for her to reestablish contact with other people. When her cellmates were asleep, she got a rope, placed a bucket under her feet and hanged herself. One of my friends found her and screamed. The guards cut her down but it was too late.

I was pregnant when I was imprisoned. They even forbade me from giving birth at a regular hospital. My baby spent one year in prison with me and then was looked after by my parents. When I was freed after three and a half years, I fled with my baby to Iraq and joined the resistance in Ashraf.’

9

Strasbourg

In the autumn of 2004 we decided to arrange for Mrs Rajavi, in her capacity as President-elect of the NCRI, to come to the European Parliament to address a meeting of the all-party Friends of a Free Iran Intergroup (FoFI), which I co-chaired with Paulo Casaca, a Socialist MEP from Portugal and a close friend. Together we had set up FoFI for the purpose of backing the restoration of democracy, the rule of law, human rights, women’s rights, the abolition of the death penalty and the abolition of nuclear weapons in Iran. On behalf of FoFI we had both travelled widely throughout the Middle East, Europe and the US in pursuit of our objective of having the PMOI taken off the various terror lists. Indeed we went to the United States on many occasions, to the Congress and the Senate. Paulo Casaca, Alejo Vidal-Quadras and other colleagues also on several occasions travelled to Iraq to visit Camp Ashraf, where at that time over 3,400 key frontline members of the PMOI were stuck as defenceless refugees under the fragile security of the occupying US military forces. These refugees were under constant threat of attack or eviction.

Paulo and I met many obstacles during our campaign. We were vilified in the media by Iranian intelligence with spurious press articles, accusing us of being ‘friends of terrorists’. Obscure advertisements naming the PMOI as a terrorist organisation appeared in parliamentary magazines and news journals in an attempt to smear us. They sometimes provided a website address, but any attempt to make contact was always met with silence. There was never an answer; the web addresses were bogus as these ads were all placed and funded by Iranian Intelligence (MOIS). They are afraid of the PMOI. They know it is the only threat to their stranglehold on Iran. That is why they became hysterical when they heard that meetings with Mrs Rajavi were taking place within the European Parliament.

The Mullahs also threw endless resources into backing bogus NGOs in Europe such as the Nejat (Saviour) Association and the Edalat (Justice) Society. Their task was to spread lies and false news about Camp Ashraf residents and the leadership of the resistance, and to traduce parliamentarians like me, Paulo Casaca, Alejo Vidal-Quadras and other opinion-leaders who backed the PMOI. The lengths the regime was prepared to go to and the resources it was prepared to invest in demonising us demonstrated the PMOI’s effectiveness and status in Iran.

The FoFI meeting on 15 December 2004 was held in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, because Mrs Rajavi was still under strict travel restrictions following her arrest by Chirac. We deemed it safer for her to travel internally by car in France from the PMOI headquarters outside Paris, to Strasbourg. (Some months later, in June 2006, a French court cancelled the ludicrous travel restrictions imposed by the Chirac government.) The meeting was attended by more than 150 MEPs and Mrs Rajavi for the first time proposed her Third Option, a clear prospect to resolve the Iranian crisis, which had caused anxiety on a global scale. She said: